I've been playing IL2 1946 since about 2010, as I play other video games and do other things for hobbies I play IL2 1946 4.12+CUP on and off, basically whenever I can be bothered to pick my hotas up. I don't have the luxury of gaming at a desk where I can leave everything setup, my PC is in my bedroom (I'm a 39 yr old single man living in a box room in his parents house because I can't afford to rent/buy my own place) and I can't leave peripherals set up all the time so I have to have the motivation to set them up.
Recently I've been having a bit of a PTO revival (probably ignited by the thought of building Airfix's upcoming 1/48 P40B kit) and have been playing USN/USMC/USAAF campaigns (both scripted and DGEN), along with a few set in the MTO, and this weekend I "completed" 15 or so missions and I've flown the past few weekends in a row. I seem to find flying US birds (such as the F4F Wildcat, F4U-1 Corsair, SBD Duantless, P40 Warhawk, P38 Lightning) more engaging than I do anything else.
When I say "completed" of course I mean I get shot up and either have to bail out or crash land - it seems very rarely do I get a kill or two and actually get to land or land properly (landing is usually a crash scenario for me anyway)...
I also seem to have a habit of doing something to my IL2 1946 install and lose my campaign progress, or it gets lost somehow anyway without me doing anything to my install, and I have to start all over again. You wouldn't believe how many times I've restarted Dragon's Pacific campaign - Pearl Harbour must be in some sort of Groundhog day zone!
When it comes to WW2 content IL2 1946 is my go to sim. DCS is a study sim and once you've learnt how to fly the aircraft there's little to do besides a few scripted campaigns which seem to be insanely difficult and thus not fun, although I found the Huey campaign reasonable but a little on the boring side and I gave up 6 missions in. The modules are expensive and bear little to no relation to each other - it's a disjointed mess with a lot of framerate problems (because they have no clue about optimization of their models and game engine and expect you to be playing on £3000 computers)! Other than that there is only Cliffs of Dover imo, but that's purely the Battle of Britain, it's good now that it's been modded but it is limited to just the Battle of Britain (something which oddly IL2 doesn't seem to have a lot of campaigns for). The current incarnation of IL2, basically an mmo, doesn't appeal to me at all - there's a lack of content, it's on the Russian Front, and the single player campaign is rubbish - you have to use a 3rd party app which operates outside of the game just to have single missions that link together in some form of dynamic campaign! Not worth the money.
I doubt very much we'll see the likes of even the stock IL2 + expansions like PF again, because games companies don't seem interested in that model of game (too much content, only minor profit), so for me IL2 will always be the sim I fly the most, until it starts to look severely dated (and by that I mean dated in terms of how, for example, dated the old Jane's Longbow games look these days).
Hopefully the modding community (and/or Team Daidalos), to whom we should all be eternally grateful, will keep the graphics side of things alive and to a good standard for some time to come.
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Topic: How Do You Play Il2? (Read 5742 times)
